Cuba - A Personal Reflection

A brief history of the revolutionary period in Cuba's history told through the author's experiences.

Abstract:

--

Excerpts:

By the late 1960s my sympathy for the African American civil rights movement and for the anti-Vietnam War movement had brought me into socialist circles where, while organizing to end the war, we also discussed and debated the nature of what later came to be called "really existing socialism," that is, the character of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, North Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba. I became drawn to the International Socialists (IS) whose intellectual leader was Hal Draper, and, after reading his famous essay "The Two Souls of Socialism," became convinced that all of those countries were not socialist at all. Their Communist parties ruled from above, while socialism had to be created and developed democratically from below.